An Innocent Fashion (23 page)

“I'm sorry, what?” I had graduated from my examination of the ice bucket to the ice cubes in my tumbler. There appeared to be frozen raspberries in the middle of them.

“Have you met Jane? The creative director?” he repeated to me. “At
R
égine
?”

I told him that yes, I'd met her.

“She's a friend of the family—I'm sure if you ever need anything there—”

“Sorry.” I tapped my ear. “It's so loud in here,” I said dismissively, motioning all around like it couldn't be helped. I didn't even try to lean toward him.

Now that Madeline was sure none of Dorian's female friends had any interest in competing for Dorian's affections, she sank into the linen cushion and blushed. “Everybody you know is
soooo
beautiful.” She surveyed them all with a detached serenity. “It's like . . . ‘Fifty Most,' all over again . . .”

I grimaced.

At school, the
Yale Rumpus
had published a special issue every year dedicated to the “Fifty Most Beautiful People” at school, for which—after an unexplained consecration process—portraits of the anointed were taken, and profiles scribed for publication. As more typical subject matter for Yale students concerned race relations or dichotomous cells, descriptive powers for “beautiful people” varied, and the issue touted a smattering reliance on cringe-worthy phrases like “
washboard abs
” and “
cheekbones you could cut diamonds on.
” On the fateful day in February, friendly clusters in Commons dining hall congregated around copies of the issue to see which of their respective crushes had made it.

It was intended as a kind of joke, although nobody ever declined to be included in “Fifty Most,” not even the feminists or the politician's sons, and shortly after its publication the selected
crop always experienced a spike in dates, love letters, and passive-aggressive glances from the same sex. Unsurprisingly, Madeline and Dorian made the cover in our sophomore year. Our friends Oliver and Helene were in that issue too, and Blake in the subsequent year's, on a page with his fraternity brothers Mike and Marcus; the best-looking jocks were generally herded together for a beefcake center spread, although their answers to the questions were boring. I was the only one who never made it, and I remember thinking it was all right—maybe
someday
I would be as beautiful as my friends, and someone would think to put me on the cover of something.

At the time Madeline had participated begrudgingly in the superficial annual tradition—she hated “
society's pointless obsession with people's least important qualities
,” which she felt was a conspiracy of “The Institution” to distract from meaningful original thought. For this reason, she had always maintained a terrible prejudice against actors and the media, yet now Madeline was explaining to us how a budding actress should go about getting the attention of Hollywood producers, and regaling us with the thrilling play-by-play of her first audition, in which evidently she had “dazzled” by virtue of having memorized all her lines.

Dorian caught my eye as I blinked glassily around. He smiled, but I pretended to have something in my glasses, and turned away to wipe them off.

“I mean, I'm perfect for it,” Madeline was saying. The role in question was a Weinstein-backed biopic on the “doomed” Mary Queen of Scots, in which she presumed that without acting experience she should play the title role.

A hand fell on my knee. “Drink more,” Dorian said. “It's an open bar.”

Someone came through with a champagne sparkler. I watched it light up everyone's faces, and yawned.

IT WAS MY OWN ATTRACTION TO DORIAN THAT HAD LED TO
his union with Madeline; therefore, blame for our threefold intertwinement (and, of course, our eventual unraveling) fell on my own shoulders—or rather, on my irrepressible heart.

The day after he asked to draw my portrait at brunch, Dorian's excitable voice called to me from the back corner of our European Art class, where he was sitting in a T-shirt and linen pajama pants.

“Rough morning?” I teased him. Next to us, muted jewel tones glowed through a stained-glass mural—the meeting of two angels, representing art and science—as our professor prepared a slide which read,
Mannerism through the Baroque Era
.

“Not at all, babe,” Dorian said. It was the first time he had called me “babe”; I feigned nonchalance as I opened to the wrong page of our textbook and offered him a nervous smile. “If anything, it was a great morning,” he went on. “I waited up for the sunrise.”

An absent flipping of pages as I lost myself in his sculpted hands. “Special occasion?” I managed.

“No. Just Wednesday morning.” He flashed one of those ship-launching smiles, which three thousand years ago would have sent a whole fleet of Trojan troops spiraling blithely to the ocean floor, and of course, I was no match for it either.

I was in love with Dorian.

I was in love with him when we sat in class, and he made a
doodle on the corner of my notepad—a billy goat standing on an elephant—and whispered, “Your turn, draw something on mine.”

I was in love with him when we studied late-night for midterms and his head dropped onto his flashcards, as he yawned, “Leonardo da Vinci . . .
Lady with an Ermine
. . . 1489 . . . what's . . . an . . . ermine . . . anyway?”

I was in love with him when we took walks, and he pointed out, “My favorite tree, see? Because it's got this knot down here that swirls into a branch up there.”

I was in love with him when he implored me, “Won't you talk to Madeline? Please, please? Just one date with her and—”

Of course, I
did
talk to Madeline. If my own love for Dorian was fated to be unrequited, I could perceive no compensation more appealing than his union with my other truest love. In part, my ends were self-motivated: At the time, I was still her “gay” best friend, and if they got together, I would be an honorary adjunct of their coupling. The more glaring motivation, however, I thought was self-evident. Dorian and Madeline would be
perfect
together.

To the contrary, Madeline's mind was already made up about “talentless, superficial” Dorian, and her righteous indignation no trifle to be reckoned with. Perhaps she knew all along that Dorian would ruin us. Until the day I met Dorian in Pierson, Madeline had never met him either; in hindsight, her presumptive reservations were so strong as to suggest extrasensory perception.

Madeline, however, seemed hardly capable of passing judgment on men. Having endured twelve years of private all-girls education, she arrived at Yale stifled by trepidation, cornered by
her inexperience into a trap: The longer she waited to enter her first relationship, the warier she became of dating. Consequently, she was obsessed with her first love being “exactly right.”

All of freshman year, I tried with frustration to see her coupled, if only to alleviate the sheer pressure of her misguided chastity. She had no shortage of interested prospects, yet she denied me the satisfaction of a single successful match. By year's end, she had—despite all her fiery rhetoric of cultural revolution—exceeded all expectations of romantic conservatism, and began to incorporate into all her objections the laughable mentioning of “marriageability.” To Madeline's mind, this dubious quality involved maturity, clearheadedness, and masculine self-assuredness—high-minded qualifications lacking in
any
male twentysomething, but especially lacking in reckless Dorian Belgraves.

Even had he theoretically satisfied her improbable conditions, his gross unsuitability had been established in her mind by his reputation as a dense New York City party boy. It was true that the summer before he transferred to Yale, Dorian's image had been splashed with irritating regularity in every fashionable media outlet with high-society coverage. But as I came to realize during our friendship, the assumptions to be made from Dorian's bad rep were inaccurate; seeking distraction after his brief and disastrous tenure at West Point, helter-skelter Dorian had merely chosen “society” as his latest preoccupation, the way he had blindly selected little papers that read, “horseback riding,” “lacrosse,” “fine art” from the same magic hat. That he was naturally suited for it was a bonus, although largely irrelevant considering his fundamental disregard for other people's opinions. Parties merely satisfied Dorian's need to feel purpose
ful. He danced and laughed and drank. People were excited to see him, and at the end of the night, it was almost like he had actually
done
something. By the end of the summer, though, his habit had dwindled, and when he started Yale he seemed to have gotten tired of people completely—for a while, at least—as he wandered the campus in self-reflective solitude, preferring interaction with his charcoal and sketchbook.

Still, this was hardly reason enough for Madeline to renege on her oft-articulated dislike of Dorian—until one weekend in November I was struck with the flu, and unable to join her for the opening of a new exhibit at the Metropolitan.

“For the love of God, just take Dorian,” I'd implored, blowing my nose. “It'll give you a chance to get to know him, and I promise,” I lied, “if you don't like him, I'll never bring it up again.”

We quibbled for twenty minutes, and in the end they went together, and what came next was as predictable as a numerical sequence. According to Madeline's breathless retelling, they talked about Marxism, the origin of consciousness, Ernest Hemingway, North African tribal art,
The Myth of Sisyphus
; blithely wandered eight times around the Egyptian gallery, twelve times around the statue of Aphrodite in the Greek gallery, and fourteen times through the arch with the banner that read “Incan Treasures,” leading to the reception party. Between them they had nine glasses of champagne and seven pastries, the start of a habit. It was Dorian who always pointed to the open bar, and Madeline who always suggested “a nibble” at the dessert table—although she only ever took a single bite, and deferred the rest to Dorian's lips.

By the fourth pastry—a bite-size cheesecake, topped with
powdered sugar and an orange twist—the exchange from Madeline's fingers to Dorian's lips involved a lick of her fingers. After the first incidence of this guileless indiscretion, Dorian apologized (“Too eager,” he ambiguously stated, through a mouth full of cream and graham cracker crust) while Madeline wiped her hand with halfhearted embarrassment on her cocktail napkin. After the second time, Dorian just stared at her as he licked his tongue deliberately over her French manicured nails, holding her by the waist, while Madeline let her fingers linger there and finally tucked them into the hair on his nape.

Three hours of conversation and pastry-facilitated flirtation led them to the museum steps, where they stood face-to-face in the center under a banner that flapped
COMING SOON
with a painting by Gauguin. Enveloping her in his arms on the top step, he kissed her—and it was as though their lips had tied a knot between the three of us.

I
was counting garment bags in my sleep like sheep when Madeline prodded me awake. “Ethan?”

The last garment bag slumped lumpily over a white picket fence into the fashion closet as I yawned and rubbed my eyes. The lights were on in the club. Dorian's head was on my shoulder, and except for a few lingering clusters, all the people had cleared out. A teenage busboy was leaning over the table, collecting watered-down glasses.

“I have to go.” I stirred. “I have
Régine
tomorrow.” I pushed off Dorian with a priggish finger and slid away from him and Madeline on the couch.

“You can't just leave us,” she said. “What about Dorian?”

At the invocation of his name, Dorian groaned, “I can't
seeee
straight any-
mooore
. . .”

“What about him? He's fine,” I assured Madeline. Dorian slumped over. I propped up his head like a mortician presenting a corpse, and said, “See?”

She whimpered and tried to shake him, as he collapsed once more with a snore, his breath reeking of gin and tonic.

“For the love of God!” My nostrils flared at their presumptuousness—that despite Dorian's yearlong estrangement, it should now be
me
saddled with the burden of his drunk body. “Where are all your
model
friends to help you?” I scowled, but the famous faces were all gone, like pages in a magazine that had been torn out. “All right, Madeline, you grab him on that side.”

Madeline just sat there limp, like a bouquet of wilted flowers, and blinked. “Don't look at me—”
hiccup!
“—like that. I'm going to play—”
hiccup!
“—the Queen of Scots.”

With a scowl, and a flash of self-hatred—Why?
Why
was I doing this?—I tossed Dorian's lazy arm around my neck and excavated him, half-dangling, out of his luxurious burrow. His fingers moved graspingly over the front of my shirt as he moaned again and dragged his feet against the wooden floor. I held him by the waist and guided him past the sweating ice bucket of empty Belvedere bottles.

“Hey, what's the rush?” Madeline whined. “Don't you—”
hiccup!
“—think we should say bye at least?”

We passed two reed-thin girls that had lingered behind. “Happy birthday, Dorian,” they said. One of them tipped over like a Chinese bamboo fountain to kiss him on the forehead, and he smiled with the blithe appreciation of a baby being put to sleep.

We stumbled outside into pouring rain. Water rushed down the cobblestone streets in rivulets, and as the ground churned,
I was reminded of something I had heard once about the Meatpacking District—that a hundred years ago, when all the butchers had their shops there, the streets used to puddle with blood.

“Madeline, get that cab!”

Teetering just below the nightclub awning, she pressed her hand against the brick wall and swayed there with her face to the ground.

“Hey,” I prodded at her, “can you—”

The cab's lights whirred right past us while Madeline moved away from me a little, staring at her feet.

“Why are you so useless?” I groaned. I ventured out into the street and squinted through the droves. One arm clutching Dorian and the other outstretched for a cab, I was punished for my resentment by a merciless onslaught of wet lashes.

A yellow cab pulled mercifully up to us. I pushed Dorian inside, and tumbled closely behind. “Come on,” I shouted to Madeline, holding the door open.

She clopped blindly toward us, eyes closed as the rainfall draped her like a veil. Her billowy sleeves fused like papier-mâché to her outstretched arms, and when her hands collided with the side of the cab, she yelped in surprise. She tilted her head back like she was about to sneeze, then suddenly keeled forward, vomiting all over the car door.

“Dear God, Madeline, we're not at Yale anymore!” I yanked her inside the cab and the driver turned to us.

“She gonna puke in here?” he barked.

“No, she's not,” I said, and pulled at her arm, which was dangling in the rain.

“I don't wanner in here if she's gonna puke. She could puke in some other cab.”

“I told you
, she's not going to vomit in your cab.” I finished yanking her errant limbs into the cab before he could protest, and slammed the door. The sound of the rain subdued, and I recited Dorian's address by heart.

Madeline's sopping head started to tailspin toward me. “No,” I instructed, as though she was a misbehaving dog, and nudged her upright with a callous jerk of my shoulder. Her hair was plastered to her face with an ambiguous blend of vomit and rain, blonde strands lining the contours of her cheekbones.

She blubbered, and I wiped off her cheeks like a child's with the back of my sleeve. The first time we had gotten drunk together was at a Pi Beta Phi party, where we had our introduction to “jungle juice.” “
It's just like Kool-Aid
,” she had marveled, having been denied all “sugary drinks” in her youth by her mother, before gulping it down in droves. Back then, it had been funny; now I was tempted to redirect the driver to my own apartment and leave both her and Dorian stranded in the cab when we arrived.

The driver kept giving me sidelong glares while the others dozed away. Despite constant propping, they seemed determined to undermine me: Dorian's head ended up on one shoulder, and Madeline's on the other. We arrived twenty minutes later, and I prodded them awake. “Wake up. It's twenty dollars.”

Madeline was cross-eyed, with her chin tilted up like she was trying to balance an invisible spoon on her nose. “No cash,” she shrugged.

“Come on, Madeline, I'm not paying for this.” I elbowed Dorian—“Hey!
Hey!
” I turned up his thigh to yank out his wallet from his back pocket. Squirming like a cat dangled over a bathtub, he remembered me and let me go ahead.

The rain felt colder the second time. Even though Dorian's building had an awning that extended to the curbside, the two of them took so long to exit the cab that we were soaked anew by the time we reached the front door. It was a familiar door—ornamented wrought iron, in a Gilded Age style—and when it opened to a familiar foyer of mahogany wood bordering peach damask walls, it revealed Harry, the night porter, who was also familiar.

“Mr. St. James!” he exclaimed, fondly patting my wet back with a white-gloved hand. “I'd been wondering when you'd come around again.”

During college, excursions into New York City had often led to sleepovers at Dorian's apartment, where compared to Madeline's, parental supervision was appreciably scarce. On the rare nights his jet-setting mother was actually home, we usually found her in the last stages of a “spirit hour” involving Percocet and Veuve Clicquot, sashaying up and down the stairs to help her face mask dry, while Buddha Bar played over the surround-sound speakers, and Nag Champa poured out from a dozen incense burners. “Don't mind me!” Edie would say, twirling a tassel on her charmeuse bathrobe. “I'm just cleansing.”

Now I buckled under Dorian's weight while Madeline tried to lean her elbow on my back like a desk.

“Are you all right? Is that Mr. Belgraves?”

Madeline smirked. “
Hiiiii Haaaarrrryyyyyy.
”

“Welcome back, Miss Dupre.” He turned to me and asked, “Have you seen Mr. Belgraves's modeling photos from Paris yet?”

I nodded with a sigh. “Can you buzz us up?”

Harry pressed the Up button on the elevator and held the door with a suited arm. “He's looking very handsome these days,
isn't he?” He gestured with a proud chin toward Dorian, whose “handsome” knees were almost scraping the hardwood floor. “I always said that boy should be a model. Just like his mother.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “Yes, you did.”

EVERYBODY HAD BEEN SAYING THAT FOR A LONG TIME, THAT
Dorian should be a model. That he ended up actually doing it wasn't much of a surprise; the surprising part was how long he held out.

He'd go up to New York City for a ball or a gala or “
some thing with Karl
,” and be accosted by a scout or a modeling agent, and every time he came back, his voice would be tainted with a harsher streak of disdain. “
They think with everything I'm capable of, I'd agree to be dressed like a rag doll and propped up for pictures
,” he'd scowl. Meanwhile, the “everything” of which he imagined himself capable was known only to him. He loathed to be perceived as just a rich, pretty face, yet had failed to augment this perception with a lasting demonstration of noninherited merit. Madeline had been appeased by his rejection of modeling as a suitable pursuit: She hated the idea of her boyfriend with his shirt off, attracting millions of eyes that didn't belong to her. Once or twice she'd attended events in New York City with him where she had witnessed the attempts. It was a joke between them: “
Three people begged Dorian to sign a contract last night
,” she'd laugh while holding onto his arm, proud that it was her who got to have him in the end.

Looking back, perhaps he knew all along, and was merely warming us up to the idea. More likely, though, he had been floating in an infinity pool in Crete when they e-mailed him with
an umpteenth invitation to Paris. He probably stirred his gin and tonic with a swizzle stick and looked across the water, then, contemplating his fondness for the Champs-Élysées, thought,
Why not?
—in regard to modeling, and his entire life. It shouldn't have come as a shock. For our trio, it had always been about the next exciting thing. We prided ourselves on intimate relations with the halfhearted cousin of true recklessness—elaborate plans culminating in afternoon naps in each other's arms, talk of road trips and big parties and graduating and going off “
into the world
,” occasionally committing to some wild gesture: splashing stone-sober into the fountain at Sterling Library, or roaring down a highway sticking out of the moonroof of Blake's car—the
shape
of change, an aesthetic.

There were plenty of drugs and alcohol to keep us feeling new and exciting, and when all else failed, we just looked around and remembered that we were surrounded by our beautiful friends, our beautiful, young life. Somehow though, it wasn't enough for Dorian—or more likely, it was too much. He thought he had eluded a life Path, that dreaded bulwark of boredom and banality which in his mind equated to a life unjustly compromised, yet maybe . . . the dreaded Path was
us
, and he had unwittingly settled into us as complacently as a gray flannel suit into a seated position from nine to five. We couldn't be sure. All we knew was that—he left. Just didn't say a word to us, and was gone.

After a series of unanswered phone calls, a final call to Dorian's mom's house in Paris confirmed it: Dorian had left. To us, the reason remained a mystery.

Barely able to believe it, Madeline cried and cried. I was upset, too, but at first I refused to take it personally. Like a housewife
who convinces herself that her absent beloved must be “working late” or “out to buy milk,” I made excuses for Dorian.
He must have had some troubles we didn't know about.
His mother had just remarried for the second time, and I knew his relationship with his father wasn't the best. Money and good looks weren't everything, you know—surely something was bothering him, and he'd be back when he was ready.

Then Paris Fashion Week happened, and the whereabouts of the spectral spouse were finally known. For the first time since his disappearance, Dorian's ghost appeared with a proverbial stumble onto our idyllic, shrub-laced porch, Windsor knot askew over his open shirt-front, and his head swirling like aerated wine. Intermingling with the faded notes of our own disgraced romance was the overpowering stench of the Other Woman's cheap perfume: There is no love whose fragrance lasts forever.

Who knew if between us there had ever been any love at all?

When the splashy headline appeared in the
Yale Daily News
it was the end of September, which had been a month of intimate relations with Madeline's tear-streaked face. “
MODEL STUDENT
,” the paper screamed in block letters, and all was explained with a picture of Dorian on the Jean Paul Gaultier runway. He appeared in pictures on the front page for the rest of the week, walking in a new show every day. Technically he wasn't even a Yale student anymore—he had transferred to la Sorbonne, we later found out—yet his was the only news anybody at school was interested in. At Yale we were used to all the usual newsworthy stories: The pre-med major discovering an elusive cancer cell, or the Rhodes scholar publishing his debut novel. The most insufferable write-ups always happened after summer vacation, when all the do-gooders returned from the corners of
Africa to pen op-ed articles about their acts of compassion in the third world, but Dorian's news-making story was atypical and alluring.

By the third day, the well-worn grooves of campus talk were universally trampled by many
have-you-heard?
pairings of “Dorian Belgraves” and “Paris Fashion Week,” the latter term having never invaded undergraduate discussion before. Dorian was like an advancing army of one, whose image steadily laid greater claim to the defenseless pages of our school paper. Over dining-hall trays he had his makeup applied backstage, his foppish long hair clipped up with silver barrettes; on study-room desks, between notes on stem cells and the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, he attended Fashion Week after-parties with all the other gorgeous Impossibles who, we assumed, had run away from their own Yales everywhere. Soon there was not a person or a surface across the Yale campus that didn't know Dorian Belgraves was having the best life of anyone we knew.

It was different for me and Madeline, of course. We were the Kübler-Ross couple, carrying out our grief in the five predictable stages. Denial, because Dorian “could've never”; then anger, because of course he did; then rationalization; depression; until finally, when we should have felt acceptance, just a deep, black lull, as Madeline relied for a few weeks on half-sputtered words and I finally realized that, if once I had loved him, now I
hated
Dorian Belgraves
.